It’s my opinion that the likely voters polling is off because the powers that be haven’t adjusted their model to reflect the last month or so. I think they are missing the new “youngs”, the new “olds”, and the new “formerly engaged”.
So I wasn’t at all surprised to see this article from The Rolling Stone.
Will a Silver Wave Help Elect Kamala Harris?
Polls suggest Donald Trump can’t count on older voters this November. Here’s why.
by Bill McKibben
LET’S SAY YOU were going to your high school prom in the spring of 1969, and you turned on the (probably AM) radio in your Mustang on the way to the school cafeteria — the Number One song in America? Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In. Fast forward 55 years, and you’re 73, right about the median age for surviving baby boomers. Which means, as we start casting votes next month, you’re going to play a disproportionate role in the outcome of the coming election. That’s because candidates have to work hard to lure younger voters to the polls, but not so with the old, who have the habit of democracy most strongly ingrained. There’s no known way to stop old people from voting.
Donald Trump might be inclined to think that’s good news for him — that as the oldest man ever to win a presidential nomination and one whose campaign is rooted in nostalgic appeals to past greatness, he should harvest most of those votes from the boomers and the Silent Generation. After all, he won those categories in 2020, though by reduced margins from 2016. But not so fast this time — remember that tune from Hair on the radio. We’re turning out more older voters all the time — about 10,000 people a day pass the 65-year mark. And increasingly, they’re starting to make that caricature — older voters are more conservative — irrelevant. Older voters come from the past — but the past they come from is changing. Which means new polling indicates that something like a silver wave may be building as November approaches.
Consider, for instance, the Fairleigh Dickinson poll last week that found the biggest lead yet for Kamala Harris — a seven-point national edge that came largely from her 16-point lead among people over the age of 65. On Thursday, a Suffolk University poll for USA Today found Harris leading Trump 53-42 among voters over 60 — her largest vote share of any demographic. And it’s the same in many of the swing states: A New York Times/Siena College poll showed her with a modest lead among older voters in Arizona — and there are a lot of older voters in Arizona. In North Carolina, another swing state crowded with retirees, she’s up by 10 points among older voters. In Maine, statistically the oldest state in the union, Harris led by 20 points among older voters. In Vermont, the second-oldest state, 61 percent of older voters thought Trump’s mental and physical health were “very poor,” higher than any other group. (Which is worth thinking about — if anyone’s an expert on gauging decline, it’s those of us who see it around us regularly, and perhaps sense it in ourselves).
h/t Mousebumples
How about you guys? Is anyone surprised by this?
Open thread.
Double Angel Match for Four Directions Montana
WaterGirl
Don’t forget to catch the 6x donations with the $750 of double-angel match in the previous post.
Up to $25 per person for a total of $750, which would come to 30 donations or so.
Mousebumples
As I’ve stated previously, I’m not sure if polling is right, representative of today but not Election Day, or way off base. Some of these numbers for specific groups seem off (*see above), but if it’s repeatable… Maybe it’s accurate?
Or maybe seniors are remembering the Old argument against Biden and thinking it still fits for Don-OLD… And not for Kamala.
As a Millennial, I can’t really offer any more insight. But I’m going to keep putting in the work. If we are up, I want to run up the score.
Matt McIrvin
No idea.
I do think we lose sight of the fact that, though the stereotype of Boomers has somehow gone from hippie to reactionary, the pre-Boomer “Silent Generation” was way more conservative than they are, and those people are dying off.
Baud
No clue.
The Audacity of Krope
@Mousebumples: Polls are garbage. Pass it on.
Mustang Bobby
He’s describing me except I’m two years younger… Class of ’71… but all else is the same: Mustang, AM radio, and Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine. Speaking for myself, I haven’t gotten more conservative as I got older… just more pragmatic, knowing that 20 years from now, if I’m not taking a dirt nap, I’ll still be out there standing up, however awkwardly, for my goddam gay rights, and the basic principle of mind your own fucking business. And that’s how it went for my parents, both who made it to 93 and went off more liberal than me.
We may be silver, but we’re still blue and likely to remain so until the end of our days.
Nelle
Nailed it for me, class of ’69, then boyfriend with a Mustang. So many of my older neighbors in this small neighborhood are voting Blue.
Mousebumples
@The Audacity of Krope: I think Nate Silver’s mathing is garbage. Idk if I can find it again, but someone posted over the weekend on bsky asking if Nate’s tweets read like someone gaming the political betting markets. And, yup, that explains a lot…
Mousebumples
@Nelle: and thanks to you for doing your part to help make Iowa a little more purplish.
BR
There’s a Women for Harris organizing Zoom call at 7pm Eastern today:
https://live.kamalaharris.com/women/en/home
I’ve been thinking the zoom calls are brilliant and hope that folks sign up and share it to keep up the momentum.
Ukai
The article doesn’t mention the possibility that more Republican voters didn’t reach age 65 because of the pandemic than Democratic voters. Given how there’s a mortality gap between Republican and Democratic counties that started to become more pronounced even before COVID (Scientifici American, 7/18/2022), I’d guess that had to have some effect.
hrprogressive
On the one hand, a lot of us are forever scarred by the massive polling miss that led to CFDT being POTUS in the first place.
On the other, polling in 2018 and 2022 massively understated how well Dems were going to do, so much so in 2022 that the much ballyhooed “Red Wave” was barely a red drip.
I do legitimately believe that polling just has not caught up with modern living, plus, all the pollsters that decided to give outsized weight to all those phantom “Hidden CFDT Voters from 2016” just haven’t really come around to a “happy medium” of how to poll today’s populace when it’s much, much, much harder to reach so many of us.
Polls said Biden was losing before The Switch, polls now seem to indicate Harris/Walz are winning.
Much rather be on the current side of polling than before.
Still apt to not trust any polling, but also think the somewhat defeatest rallying cry of “work like we’re down 10 points” isn’t as motivating to normie voters as those who parrot it think it is.
The Audacity of Krope
Wouldn’t surprise me. I’m only really bothered if it influences the actual voting.
Scout211
I have no idea if there is a “silver wave” but it certainly is possible because now there are more reasons for senior women to support a woman who will protect women’s health and women’s rights. Trump has proven that he won’t.
This is just in from SCOTUS:
So crisis counseling services can’t use federal funds unless they provide information about abortion. This is a step in the right direction.
OId Man Shadow
I don’t have a fucking clue what’s going on with voters. I mean, I get that 42% of them are motherfucking assholes and another 42% of them are decent people, but it’s the 18% that are just fucking weird and fuck if I know what motivates them, cause it ain’t policy or achievements. And it sure as fuck ain’t saving democracy in America.
Maybe try shaking some keys in front of one of them and see if they’ll follow you to the polls on election day.
Baud
@The Audacity of Krope:
Doubt it does directly. But it could influence donating and media coverage.
Tim in SF
I wish every time any article mentioned polling, the story carried an obligatory tagline: “as long as the electoral college exists, if you live in a blue state or a red state, your vote for president doesn’t matter. You might as well vote for Taylor Swift.”
Matt McIrvin
@hrprogressive: People who say that just don’t understand how far down “down 10 points” is. What they *mean* is something like “fight like we’re down 0.3 points”
(Or, accounting for the Electoral College, “fight like we’re up 2 points and therefore still barely losing”).
SW
Old people know that past a certain age (diff for everyone) taking care of yourself physically becomes your prime consideration. This is not simply a selfish impulse. Being able to care for yourself as long as possible means that someone else doesn’t have to do it. I believe that is why many of us who have great affection for Joe Biden were uncomfortable with his running this time around. Biden’s apparent frailty masked the fact that Trump is damn near as old as he is.
The Audacity of Krope
Garbage begets garbage…
WaterGirl
@Ukai: Interesting thought!
OId Man Shadow
@Tim in SF: I mean, she’s pretty, personable, decent by most accounts, and comes with her own army of loyalists ready to phone bank and make social media videos for free promoting her.
We could do a lot worse.
I sound like I’m joking, but I’m not.
The Audacity of Krope
Work like the goal is 60 rather than 51. Earn that landslide, baby.
Steve LaBonne
Soon to be 69 and I have moved significantly left over the years. When I was young and stupid I did stupid things like voting for Gerald Ford (my first presidential vote, alas) and John Anderson (fortunately I was in New York for the former and Illinois for the latter so it didn’t do any harm). No more mistakes after that, though for a time I was definitely a centrist Bill Clinton Democrat.
Maxim
I have no idea if these numbers are close to accurate — it would depend on all the usual polling details, the size of the sample, how the questions were phrased, etc. Sure would be nice if it were true, though.
BR
@hrprogressive:
Yeah, I would rather a message of “Crush them with Joy” — a message that we want a landslide but that it’s with optimism that we’re going to go to the polls rather than fear.
Matt McIrvin
@Tim in SF: I don’t wish that, because I want people to vote. Both for the downticket races, and because “safe” margins can become unsafe in the presence of mass voter apathy.
Ukai
Just chipped in $25. Thanks, WG!
karen marie
Like fucking Pepperidge Farms, “we remember.”
Matt McIrvin
@BR: Psychologists say fear is a bad motivator–it freezes people up.
WaterGirl
@Ukai:
That’s 6x donation #4 out of 25 to take us to $750.
hrprogressive
@Matt McIrvin:
My point is, they want people to work hard and not rest on their laurels of “oh the polls say we’re up”. Which, I get that.
But in today’s society if a candidate is -10% to their opponent, I think most folks on the opposite side would call that a “lost cause”.
And nobody wants to fight for a “lost cause”.
But they do want to fight for a close race that can be won.
But, to your point, it’s really hard to soundbite “Act like we’re within the margin of error and the electoral college is going to fuck us over if we don’t win by more”
FelonyGovt
Class of 1970 here. Yes, Age of Aquarius, psychedelic music, peace and love and protesting against the Vietnam War. I’m in a Huddle post carding group of angry older ladies.
Miki
@Matt McIrvin: Yep – waaaay more conservative.
As a Boomer (born in 1955), my experience of my cohorts is many were just a tad too timid to do much more than dip their toes into the immensely interesting and vibrant counter culture of the 60s, but they certainly were attracted to the beautiful noise (see, e.g., birth control pills, weed, etc.). Over time the reluctance morphed into resentment (stupidly so but consider it a byproduct of privilege). IMO, some, maybe a lot, of them are frankly repulsed by and unwilling to embrace the RWNJs of MAGA.
So, yeah. A silver wave might be out there.
But, perhaps like their parents, they default to silence.
Did I mention they’re timid?
BR
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah. I saw this interesting article the other day:
https://lucid.substack.com/p/why-joy-is-an-effective-anti-authoritarian
UncleEbeneezer
@Matt McIrvin: In football and basketball, 10 points is only a couple of possessions of the ball. Ten point swings can happen in just a minute or two. But when I hear the expression I always think of single point increments (like runs in baseball or goals in soccer) where ten points is damn near insurmountable.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
It’s also not true at a societal level. If California voters are apathetic, it’s more likely than not that Pennsylvania voters will be too. It’s why those “protest votes” by liberals and lefties in red or blue states are a bad idea. It’s not easy to contain a sentiment geographically.
hrprogressive
@BR:
“Bury Fascism With Joy” or something.
I’d love to see 400 EV’s. I don’t see it happening, but that level of victory would be the kind that is not going to be called into question.
karen marie
@OId Man Shadow:
I’m nominating this for a rotating tag. lol
FastEdD
Yep I’m silver and of course I’m voting Harris. Of course polls are garbage. One thing for sure is that older voters always show up. I am thrilled to see a huge increase in registration of younger voters. I just hope they vote. Damn kids. Get off my lawn.
mrmoshpotato
@Matt McIrvin:
Exactly this.
Tom Q
@hrprogressive:
Yeah, I’d say “work like it’s a dead heat” is a more useful rallying cry.
I’m yet another person who fits the article’s demo perfectly — graduated high school in 1969, to the tune of Aquarius. I’ll chime in with what Matt McIrvin said above: the silent-generation-and-older were always more reliably Republican than the Boomers; losing them from the voting population via actuarial table has made the oldest cohort less red. Though this will change yet again as Gen X ages, because they, in turn, have been more conservative than boomers.
The great hope is still the youngest — and that group now extends to as old as 40, folks who started off voting Obama and have been reliably Dem even if they haven’t always turned out in the numbers we’d prefer. The 2012 GOP post-Romney autopsy saw this coming, but the fluky Trump EC win ended any hope of the party modernizing enough to reverse the trend.
And now Harris seems to have ignited these young folk, giving me hope they deliver an unexpectedly strong punch in November.
Kirk
I rather like “Don’t stop to celebrate until the race is over.”
narya
No clue about the polls–BUT! Dobbs Dobbs Dobbs (and Obergefell, too, I think). We olds may be more “conservative” in some ways, but the notion that LGBTQ folks should disappear and that women shouldn’t have bodily autonomy are, I hope, bridges too far. I’m a terrible judge, as I’m all the way on the left (I’ve never voted for a R) and I live in a blue enclave. And did I mention Dobbs?
The Audacity of Krope
Sitting on a bench outside the gym with my Planet Fitness app open and half my heart telling me I can go downstairs back to the train home…
Misterpuff
The Blue Haired Ladies (& Gentlemen) are going Blue!
Ishiyama
Hey, we’re the “Don’t trust anybody over 30” generation; Acid, Amnesty & Abortion, it is all coming back full circle now. Yes, we vote. We just couldn’t outweigh the votes of our elders. Until lately.
Greg Stone
The older the group, the greater the percentage of women.
Miki
{{{{{Mustang Bobby}}}}}
The Audacity of Krope
Especially in that they should only be 16.
PatrickG
@Matt McIrvin: I had always understood the “10 points” to reference American football, ie you’re down at least two scoring plays. It’s a lot but it’s not impossible to come back from. Teams do it all the time!
edit: UncleEbeneezer beat me to it.
Baud
@Ishiyama:
I think Boomers and Gen X still skew slightly red. Just not as much as Silents.
Baud
@PatrickG:
Onside kick!
Redshift
@hrprogressive:
I’ve always liked Howard Dean’s “It’s not enough to beat the margin of error, we have to beat the margin of cheating!”
(From when he was DNC chair, not a primary candidate, just to be clear.)
Baud
All these slogans are kind of weird. Who’s the audience for them? What are you trying to get them to do that they’re not doing?
PatrickG
@Baud: you’re way past me in sportsball expertise now. My wife has forced me to learn some things in sheer self defense, but…
Fun fact about me: Until my mid teens I had this vague impression that bunting in baseball meant hanging some kind of drapery to distract the opposing pitcher. I still maintain that makes more sense than what they actually do.
Redshift
I chipped in another $25, WG!
hrprogressive
@Redshift:
This is, sadly, all too true now.
The Audacity of Krope
@Baud: Vote harder. Bring friends. Make friends. Bring them. Run up the scoooooore!
Capri
I once read an article that said that the idea that folks become more conservative as they age is a crock.
Rather, their political bent is set in early adulthood and then persists. All the conservative old people we’ve seen in the past 1-2 decades became R due to Reagan and the “shining city on the hill” prose and were conservative young people first.
SatanicPanic
Who knows. I would guess that some old people are self aware enough to have concerns about another elderly person being in such a high stress job. They’ve probably seen someone decline in the same way Trump is. But I’m just speculating AKA being responsible
WaterGirl
Can anyone tell me which post from the last 3 days and the Shaun Fein video linked in it? He was wearing a pink t-shirt and I commented that it was essentially the same as his speech at the DNC.
FOUND IT!
Hungry Joe
POSTCARD UPDATE — SERIES 2
Postcards to Swing States:
Yesterday — 14
Running total — 156
Baud
@WaterGirl:
BJ pop quiz?
Matt McIrvin
@Tom Q:
I hear this a lot and I’m not 100% convinced–I think that we GenXers were more conservative than boomers when we were younger, but it’s no longer true. I keep coming back to this Pew poll that breaks down party ID trends by age cohorts:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/age-generational-cohorts-and-party-identification/
If you scroll down there’s this really interesting breakdown where they look at how different cohorts evolved over time. In 1990, GenXers were the most Republican generation of all! By 2023, older cohorts had moved way to the right and Gen X basically hadn’t moved. And younger people were overwhelmingly Democratic.
There’s also a gender breakdown in there that suggests that the supposed wave of reactionary young men has been greatly exaggerated.
There does seem to an interesting blip in that survey that might be relevant to this thread, which shows people in their 70s slightly more Democratic than either older Silents or younger Boomers. But it’s small enough that it could just be noise.
WaterGirl
@Baud: No, I really need to find the video.
The Audacity of Krope
@Capri: I’m inclined toward the theory that younger leftists and liberals are activated early out of empathy. “Conservatives,” so called, in the same age cohort get activated later as they become interested in the two things that might involve a selfish person, taxes and deregulation.
BR
@hrprogressive:
I just tried generating an image with one of the AI image generators of this prompt:
It didn’t do a great job, but that’s because AI image generators are bad at text.
Redshift
@Baud: They’re aimed at supporters/volunteers and potential ones, to motivate them to do more (or maybe to feel good about what they’re doing.)
I don’t know if they’re much good other than rah rah team, because in my experience, there aren’t many volunteers who decide it’s in the bag and stop volunteering.
WaterGirl
@Redshift:
That’s 6x donation #5 out of 25 to take us to $750.
eclare
@Baud:
Good point.
TBone
I thought this was laying it on a little thick:
I mean I get why it’s there, but his campaign shoved a female employee at Arlington, and the whole entire point of the cemetery is nostalgic appeal to past greatness, so he fucked that up but good.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
I’m on my phone so not easy to search.
Redshift
@hrprogressive:
It is, but it’s worth remembering that ain’t new, either. It wasn’t a shocking thing to say in the Shrub era.
Scout211
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were senior women who will vote for Kamala Harris who didn’t vote for Hillary. There was just so much irrational Hillary resentment in 2016. In 2024, Kamala Harris is young, competent and a champion for women and women’s rights. I can see senior women seeing Kamala Harris a much better choice than Trump for the future of our country and for their own female family members’ future.
I don’t see that many senior men changing their vote from Trump to Kamala Harris, though.
Matt McIrvin
@Capri: That Pew survey I just linked to suggests that Boomers really have become more Republican between the 1990s and the 2020s.
But that might be partly due to differential survival: non-white and poor people die sooner, leaving a cohort more likely to vote Republican.
eclare
@PatrickG:
Hahaha…
JWR
I was just watching a clip of Morning Joe, and one of them, either a host or a guest, said that the excitement following the grand switcheroo added up to a “pre-convention” Harris bounce, and that’s why the polls since then don’t show much of a bounce.
They also had fun with Trump claiming that his word salad is actually a brilliant, nine dimensional ruse that he calls “The Weave”. Here’s that clip:
Redshift
@TBone: Yeah, the core of all conservatism is the promise of a return to an ideal past that never existed. TCFG’s is much more rooted in “punish our enemies and force everyone to conform to our new reality.”
frosty
@Nelle: Nailed it for me, too. Class of ’69 … but I took the Bugeye Sprite to the prom. My twin brother drove the Mustang.
We bought the Hair album when it came out.
zhena gogolia
@JWR: Serpentine!
Matt McIrvin
@JWR: I suspect that’s right: we pretty much got our bounce before the convention started, and that’s what we get.
However, Josh Marshall has noted that Harris’s favorable/unfavorable ratings keep creeping up, despite Republican attempts to smear her personally, which is interesting.
TBone
@Redshift: 👍 glad you articulated that better than I could.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Found it, yay!
Blue shirt, not pink.
Baud
@Scout211:
Beyond the Hillary hate, there’s something about being a trial blazer for others.
Would Obama have won if Jesse Jackson hadn’t run in 1988? Who knows?
Hungry Joe
As a former semi-hippie (“semi-“ because in those years I was always either in college or working a real job), I’ve never bought into the “hippies sold out and went corporate” crapola. We were very much in the minority then, and the conservative majority of our generation simply continued to be conservative … or worse.
I haven’t changed much since then, although I haven’t been quite the same since Country Joe & the Fish broke up.
Baud
@Hungry Joe:
Nixon did win the youth vote in 68, I believe.
raven
I came home 55 years ago today.
WaterGirl
@Baud: I finally remembered that I had written something like as far as I’m concerned he can give this speech every day until forever.
I searched for forever on Balloon Juice on google, and it came right up.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: That fact that Kamala Harris literally is the Vice-President, someone we already elected to be the backup President and therefore presumably felt this was conceivable, also helps. (Harris has been Acting President for brief periods.)
I haven’t been hearing nearly as much “would it be weird to have a woman President?” talk this time around. Mostly it’s something Republicans try to use in sexist smears and it backfires. Harris isn’t playing it up as much as Hillary Clinton did, either, but that may be because she doesn’t need to.
raven
@Hungry Joe:
Now your patrons have all left you in the red
Your low-rent friends are dead
This life can be very strange
All those Day-Glo freaks who used to paint their face
They’ve joined the human race
Some things will never change
Baud
@raven:
Yay! On behalf of BJ, we are grateful.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
I’m glad I didn’t waste hours searching for “pink shirt.”
Ishiyama
@Baud: The voting age was 21 that year.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
Except that I didn’t go to prom, I match the article: graduated high school in 1969, am now 73 (!! -when did that happen?). Have always voted Dem – my first vote was in the CA primary for McGovern in 1972, back when you had to be 21 to vote. And I am a woman, altho my husband (72) is actually more to the left than I am. I have always been a mainstream Dem, as was my mother, a HS English teacher.
Baud
@Ishiyama:
True. Do you think 18-20 would have voted significantly different?
raven
@Baud: And nobody spit on me in the airport!
raven
@Ishiyama: No it wasn’t. As I said, I came home 55 years ago today and was 19. I couldn’t vote until the following November.
Baud
@raven:
Yeah, I guess it was up to the state back then.
raven
@Baud:In light of the increasing calls for lowering the voting age, President Richard Nixon added a provision to do so in the 1970 extensions of the Voting Rights Act. This new act of Congress was challenged in the Supreme Court case of Oregon v. Mitchell, where it was determined that Congress has the authority to lower the voting age for federal elections, but not for state elections. A proposed amendment to have the voting age lowered for all levels of government was proposed and passed by both chambers of Congress in March 1971. After being sent out to the states for ratification, the new amendment – now recognized as the Twenty-sixth – was ratified on July 1, 1971. The Twenty-sixth Amendment has faced a few legal challenges in the decades since its ratification, with the general arguments ranging from how a college student from out-of-town is represented at the polls, if the amendment extends any other political institutions such as serving on a jury, or if voter identification laws are valid and recognized beneath it. On its own, the Twenty-sixth Amendment addressed one of the larger domestic controversies that had emerged amid the Cold War. The question of a citizen being old enough to fight and vote was asked, and it was answered.
Schtreaky
I think McKibben’s analysis is all hope and fantasy. I think @Ukai‘s hypothesis is more interesting and worthy of greater consideration.
This McKibben quote is the view of a privileged white man:
Jim Crow was pretty effective at stopping old people from voting; so is gerrymandering. Old (and young) Democrats in Republican-controlled states will find out in November how effective Republicans can be when they want to stop “those people” from voting — or at least from having their votes counted.
Baud
@raven:
Thanks. I didn’t know that.
TBone
@raven: happy anniversary, glad you’re here!
raven
@Baud: Somehow it’s stuck with me.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: I felt that very strongly when Hillary was giving her speech at the convention.
twbrandt
‘73 high school grad here, and I have definitely moved left as I got older. I voted for Bush in 2000, but the Iraq War with its lies, corruption, incompetence, and cynicism completely destroyed my illusions about the Republican Party specifically and the conservative movement in general.
I’ve been moving left ever since.
frosty
@raven: That’s a hell of an anniversary. Glad you ended up here!
zhena gogolia
I had a crush on Henry Cabot Lodge, but I very quickly moved left after that and have never voted for any Republican except Lowell Weicker.
WaterGirl
@raven: Wow.
zhena gogolia
Leave it to me to comment just as a new thread goes up.
WaterGirl
@Baud: LOL
raven
@TBone:
@frosty:
And I retired 5 years ago today!
zhena gogolia
@raven: That’s a good anniversary too! I can’t wait.
raven
@WaterGirl: Straight to the U of I and Bromley Hall!
frosty
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): My first vote was also in the CA primary, where I was in college and changed my registration. I have a late-year birthday so I was 20 in June ’72 and needed the 26th Amendment. I thought McGovern was too conservative; I voted for Shirley Chisholm. She didn’t win.
TBone
@BR: I am a believer!
jefft452
“There’s no known way to stop old people from voting.”
Covid gave it a good try
frosty
@raven: You have a picture for EVERYTHING!! Amazing in the days before cell phones and pocket cameras.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@twbrandt: I started out with a choice between Nixon and Humphrey and could NOT understand how anyone could be taken in by Tricky Dick. Or how anyone could vote for Reagan (I am a Northern Californian, remember), or Bush the Elder, or Shrub. I still can’t believe anyone was taken in by Republican bs so many times.
WaterGirl
@raven: You look kind of conservative there!
artem1s
The GOP just can’t help themselves from stepping on the Social Security third rail. Boomers have waited a long time for their SS payout and they are tired of the GOP fucking with their 401Ks every couple of years.
Citizen Alan
@Scout211: I know several women who hated Hillary because she didn’t divorce Bill. I’m not sure I understand that mentality, but then, I’m not a woman of a certain age whose former husband cheated on her with a younger woman.
raven
@WaterGirl: I’d only been home a couple of weeks. The Army cut our hair on the way out and I didn’t get it cut again for 5 years and that was because, when I broke my back, they taped my hair up and it was like that for 2 months!
Matt McIrvin
By the way, I’ve noticed that Bernie Sanders is suddenly campaigning HARD for Kamala Harris in YouTube ads. That ought to be helpful with a number of demographics, though I suppose not with people who have a hate-on for Bernie Sanders. I think it’s great to see him on board.
TBone
@jefft452: am I laughing or crying, hmmmm
Laughing it is!
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@frosty: you are a girl after my own heart! I have always been a very pragmatic voter so never voted for Shirley, but I admire her so much, more as the years go by and I realize what she did and had to put up with. Unbought and unbossed, indeed!
raven
@frosty: I was in an artsy tribe in Champaign-Urbana in those days. I have 26000 pics in my Flickr account.
TBone
@raven: ain’t life grand? 💜
sab
@SW: And if he’d had to resign in his second term, getting a decent replacement VP through the Senate would be damn near impossible, and Mike Johnson as second in line horrifying.
Mike E
@zhena gogolia: The In-Laws reference, nice!
@raven: You and my 2nd oldest sister also had to wait until age 21 (as did sis #1). I was 17 when Reagan was running, I wanted to vote against that bastard so hard!
sab
@Citizen Alan: I am a woman a bit younger than her, and I thought it was her own damn business at the time, and I look at how Chelsea turned out and think she absolutely made the right call.
TBone
@raven: you remind me a little, tiny bit of a young Edward Everett Horton in that photo, and that is a compliment (both quite handsome in the photos of your youth).
Harrison Wesley
I don’t know if it’s Trump himself, but the Republican inability to shut up about cutting Social Security and Medicare probably isn’t winning friends among Olds no matter which generation they identify with.
TBone
@Harrison Wesley: good eye!
Jackie
@narya: Speaking of Dobbs… this article suggests Dobbs could be Cancun Cruz’s Waterloo:
sab
@artem1s: You are so right. They said when I was in high school that Social Security would be broke and gone long before I retired. Then Reagan’s crew doubled the Social Security to stabilize it, but the next generations of Republicans went after it at every opportunity. And here I am in my seventies, mostly living on Social Security. My IRA bounces around in value all the time, but Social Security just keeps plugging along dependably.
TBone
@Matt McIrvin: 👍 he’s been a solid team player for a while now.
Ohio Mom
@Miki: Also born in 1955 and I don’t know if I’d call our cohort timid as much as we were a little bit too young to go full counter-culture. In 1968, we were only 14, and not all that savvy or independent yet. I can’t imagine the question, “Hey mom, can you drive me to the demonstration downtown?” would be met with much approval in too many families.
Now I know a fair number of people born in the Sixties. I was 42 when Ohio Son was born, and as a result, his classmates’ moms were all in the range ten years younger than me.
I don’t know if I’d describe that group as conservative but they do tend to be clueless about social issues.
frosty
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): Ahem. Sorry, I’m not a girl after your own heart. And not planning to become one either. Sorry ’bout that, Chief!
ETA I’ve posted this a lot in comments until you’re all probably bored by it, but Barack wasn’t the first black presidential candidate I voted for and Hillary wasn’t the first woman.
Gloria DryGarden
@TBone: I’ve been shoved aside, and it leaves a bad feeling. I keep thinking about that employee there at Arlington
frosty
@raven: I don’t have 26,000 pix at all! I had an SLR in college and after, and on some of my travels, and hardly took any pictures. Good for you! I love seeing them all.
Jackie
@WaterGirl: I don’t remember which post, but Fain was wearing his “Trump is a Scab” teeshirt at Harris’ Labor Day speech in Detroit, yesterday!😁
SW
@Baud: He promised to end the war. Humphrey was considered complicit.
sab
@Ishiyama: I voted for McGovern in 1972 when I was 18. It was my sister’s first chance to vote, and she was 21.
ETA: I voted absentee because I was absent from Ohio at the time, and I had to get my absentee ballot notarized!
WaterGirl
@raven: You have been through so much, Raven!
Gloria DryGarden
@Matt McIrvin: he could sell Bernie for Kamala merch mittens!
CaseyL
I just don’t trust any polls at all: their methodology is either too sloppy or too tight, with margins of error they should be embarrassed by; and their results are almost always analyzed with some kind of bias, depending on who’s paying. (That includes polls we like because they reassure us.)
I particularly don’t trust national polls, because we don’t have a national election. Polls showing Harris-Walz ahead by 4, or 6, or 7 points nationally is meaningless. Running up the score in, say, California does no good in Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania.
WaterGirl
@Jackie: I found the video, and I updated my request in my comment above.
I was looking for a particular thing at the end of the video – a fist in the air – but I love the video so much I’m putting up a post with it later.
Gloria DryGarden
I know it’s a dwindling thread, but did y’all see the two pix of CF TFG? On the front page. A few threads back. In the side by side w Harris, he looked pale and not so great. And a few threads ago, he was pictured in an astronaut suite. Perhaps he can test drive another Boeing out to the space station. It’s a reliable vehicle, right? We trust Boeing, don’t we?
CaseyL
Why are everyone’s comments getting struck through? Or is that just me?
Gloria DryGarden
@CaseyL: me too. Weird.Side bar stuff, too
Craig
What happened with all these score throughs?
Gloria DryGarden
This thread all struck out, next thread seems clear, for me. Maybe only the page you were on got it.
what the heck
Baud
TestEunicecycle
For me the whole thread before this one is struck out too!
brantl
@SW: Biden’s seeming frailty, not spparent frailty, Biden isn’t frail.
Another Scott
I’d like to believe this. But it seems like a huge change.
FD.edu has more details.
They weighted the 801 by the 2020 election characteristics.
Various calculators give about an 8% margin of error (which i believe means +/-8%).
So “16%” is “8% to 24% with a 95% confidence interval”. It’s good to be ahead, but that’s a pretty big range.
18-30 year olds say they will vote the same as 65+ except that 5% more throw their votes away on someone else in the younger group? Does that make sense?? It seems wacky to me.
No Democracy. No Ukraine. No Education. No Health Care. No Investment in the Future. No Demented Weird Old Guy vs Young Joyful Team
Good polling is hard. They mainly wanted to see the effect of Race and “Sex” questions, and maybe they got some interesting answers here. But their choice of important topics was very, very limited.
Dunno…
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
I guess Baud was right to be worried about comment quality tests.
[eta:] WG was changing “25” to “30” downstairs, maybe a strike tag didn’t quite get closed correctly. I assume it’s temporary.
Cheers,
Scott.
dkinPa
@BR: I love the battle cry “crush them with joy!” Stealing that, thank you very much!
Yikes, don’t know how the comment came out with strikeout. My fat fingers did it again. . . .
A Man for All Seasonings (formerly Geeno)
I think there’s an open del tag somewhere.
Looks like someone got it
Jackie
@CaseyL: Me, too! Are we all stricken from BJ?
Jackie
This thread has given me a headache 🤕
Oh! It’s fixed! No more
strikeouts!AM in NC
On the one hand, surprising because of voting history of older people.
On the other hand, older people tend to be patriotic and value normal democratic order.
on the third hand, older women are pissed as hell they have to fight fights they thought they were done with.
Uncle Cosmo
Coincidentally, just FTR, 79 years ago yesterday the most brutal, vicious, sanguinary and destructive war in history finally ended when representatives of the Japanese Empire signed documents surrendering unconditionally to the United Nations on board the U.S.S. Missouri at anchor in Tokyo Bay.
Sally
@Kirk: Don’t stop till you get enough!
Sally
@JWR: More of a soup than a weave.
chemiclord
I am equally as wary and dismissive of any poll that has Harris winning senior citizens by double digits as I am of polls that had Trump pulling over 30% of black Americans while he was running against Biden.
A shift that massive would be very evident and noticeable even at the ground level.
billcinsd
@Baud: Basically outlawed with the new rules
Chris T.
@Tom Q:
Also, sometimes it is, even in a blue state like WA, in a downticket race. Our public-lands commissioner had a near tie, with the one D candidate holding a 51 vote lead over the 2nd-position R candidate. Fifty-one votes! One thousandth of one percent! https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/wa-lands-commissioner-recount-results-democrat-upthegrove-poised-to-advance-to-general/